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The first time Sakura stops a man’s heart with nothing but the delicate, desperate pull of her chakra and her fingertips, she is fourteen.
At fourteen, she is the Godaime's disciple.
She is the famed Copy Ninja’s charge—and rumors may say that she is, perhaps, his favorite of his three newly-minted chunin.
She is a student whose dreams revolve around reputation and corruption and destruction. She dreams of surpassing the generation that came before her.
She is the gravity that holds the second coming of the Sannin together.
When Sakura is fourteen and learning the depths of her power, she is desperate to defend against an unrelenting onslaught of attacks.
It would be easier for her to deal with their opponents on her own. If her boys had been here . . . this fight would have ended fifteen minutes ago.
But she is not alone.
Nor does she have Naruto or Sasuke to fall back on.
Not here. Not now.
Team 7 may have gotten their promotion—territory that comes with each of them finding a personal mentor in three of the greatest ninja who ever lived—but the majority of the Rookie Nine hasn’t.
Asuma’s team is skilled, and Sakura will be the first to admit that. But they have yet to learn any semblance of self discipline.
And Sakura has not yet figured out how to balance defense with her offense.
She feels the flow of chakra strengthen her proximal phalanges, softening the ligaments of her interphalangeal joints, to limit their susceptibility to fracture, as she punches straight down.
The ground half-collapses beneath her, shaking apart beneath her enemy’s feet before they both jump away.
She glances back at Team 10. They’re engaged in battles with the other half of their pair of attackers, and Sakura is acutely aware that someone’s life will hang in the balance if she makes one wrong move.
Team 10 is skilled, but . . .
Ino is—well, she’s Ino, as Sakura remembers her from their last years at the Academy.
She is more than formidable, but her ego stops her from really learning anything.
Even under Tsunade’s direction, she’d been too embarrassed to admit she needed help and gave up once she could apply the basics of healing.
(In this, she finds fragments of the girl she used to adore. Willing to put her friends—her team, her family—above her own pride, the way she did when they were inseparable.)
Ino’s fingers are poised in preparation to wield her clan’s famed jutsu. Shikamaru’s shadow is creeping up behind the man’s feet, gone unnoticed in favor of Chouji’s long, loud distraction that involves a mix of yelling and clan techniques.
For all of Shikamaru’s genius, it had taken too long for him to think of this plan—too much time spent trying to analyze the use of Sakura’s abilities, because he’d been too lazy to think about it in the coming days.
Fifteen minutes is more than enough to cost a life in the heat of battle.
Chouji is also visibly confused and a little annoyed, because in this, he’s meant to play scapegoat until they can get their attacker into the Ino-Shika portion of Ino-Shika-Cho.
It’s not a good look.
One of Kakashi-sensei’s first lessons had been: Always act confident, even when you aren’t. Any ninja worth half their salt will take your insecurity and use it to their advantage.
This isn’t ideal.
Sakura presses a tag—one of Naruto’s personal and conveniently unrecognizable creations—into the tree behind her, at Shikamaru’s direction.
She does it slowly by her standards, placing it lower than she would an explosive tag. It’s obvious, but not so much that it’ll raise any suspicion of her intentions.
As her opponent’s wind jutsu barrages toward her, Sakura shields her face instead of dodging and grimaces at the sheer force of it.
It leaves behind a gash at the ulnar side of her left arm, bleeding and soaking through the mesh of her sleeve.
She snarls and throws a kunai in his direction, using the leverage to launch herself back. Sakura leans down and shoves another kunai into the tag.
Simultaneously, she focuses healing chakra into her wound. Her opponent watches it close, eyes narrowed, gaze flicking from her now-unmarred skin to the tag she’d just touched.
Sakura jumps back into the range of his attacks, this time dodging the gale that threatens to ruin more of her clothing.
His eyes fall back to the tag, and Sakura knows she’s won.
Her opponent launches himself at her, his body still turned towards the tree. His intentions would be clear even if they weren't part of Shikamaru’s strategy.
It’s amateur. Unbecoming of a man twice her age.
She allows him to nick her other arm. Her skin closes as it opens, slowly enough that he will be able to see his work undone in detail.
He narrows his eyes, and in an instant, he’s behind her, pulling out the knife buried in wood.
Sakura raises her hands.
Her opponent’s body is pulled into the ground, leaving only his head exposed to air. His eyes are wide now, but he isn’t looking at her.
Purple, paralytic poison bubbles up dangerously as it drips down the tree trunk and towards his exposed face.
Courtesy of Anko—she’d gifted the poison to Sasuke, who’d gifted it to Kakashi-sensei, who’d gifted it to Naruto, who’d made a seal out of it and given it to Sakura.
She steps toward him, and he growls, animalistic and wild. Sakura smiles, all teeth. “Talk,” she encourages. “This stops whenever you want it to.”
A barrage of emotion flies through his face, and then he grimaces. “We’re just in it for the money. Some—rich guy, up in the Fire Daimyo’s council. He doesn’t want the Leaf knowing shit about his plans.”
With a wave of her hands, Sakura creates a crater for the poison to pool into. It’s shallow enough that it would take no time at all to pour itself into his face, if Sakura wanted it to.
They’re both well aware of this.
Sakura feels the strain of so much jutsu weighing on her—she can feel it in the sluggishness of her arms, the tired ache of hunger in her gut—but she grits her teeth and pretends it isn’t there.
She knows that they’re both aware of this, too.
“Who?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. They’ve never cared to share the details.”
She can believe that. In fact, Sakura’s sure that he’s telling the truth.
But she has no reason to take that risk. This man is skilled enough that he will be able to escape once he regains his chakra. It’s cool out, today.
He will be more than fine in a few hours.
There is no reason for her to let him go.
And there is no reason for her to kill him, either.
Sakura’s time debating this is cut short when Ino screams, loud and shrill and pained.
When Sakura finally gets to her, there’s a dagger sticking out of her bare shoulder and tears streaming greedily down her face. Chouji is leaning over her, and Shikamaru is leading their attacker away with Shadow Possession, the fear in his eyes palpable as he glances back and forth.
“Sakura,” Ino hisses, her grip on Sakura’s forearm like a vice. “Fuck—I didn’t—I didn’t see that coming.” She squeezes her eyes shut as Sakura presses torn fabric into her mouth.
“I would be surprised if you did,” Sakura responds, voice barely above a whisper. She turns to her left, but doesn’t take her eyes off of Ino’s shoulder. “Chouji, go help Shikamaru. Ino’ll be fine.”
Something that sounds an awful lot like I will? comes out of Ino’s gagged mouth, and Sakura rolls her eyes. “Shut up, Ino-pig,” she murmurs, and pulls out the knife.
Ino bites down on her scream.
Sakura’s chakra burns away any possibility of infection in a way she knows hurts beyond belief, and she’s glad that Ino can’t talk right now. She doesn’t have enough chakra to close it all the way up—barely enough to quell the bleeding itself before she dresses it.
With her good arm, Ino pries the gag out of her mouth. Sakura tries to catch her breath. Healing a wound of that caliber is never easy.
Before long, Ino coughs out, “Sakura,” again, eyes so much wider.
Sakura feels the presence behind her before the arm is wrapped around her throat, but it’s too late by the time her mind registers her original opponent’s strangling force.
Ino’s yelling again, louder, fingers pressed into the hand seals for the Mind Body Switch technique, but Sakura knows from the diagnostic she’d run that Ino only has the bare-bones of chakra left—definitely not enough to perform such a draining jutsu.
Sakura doesn’t have enough energy to do anything here. Except—her hand has been pressed, fairly awkwardly, actually, into her opponent’s chest.
Right over his heart.
Sakura chokes out a breath, inhales as hard as she can against the force of his bicep against her esophagus.
Diagnostic chakra runs over her palm and into her fingers, and she thinks out a prayer to—she doesn’t know who—as she feels what is unmistakably his vena cava under her chakra.
If blood cannot enter the heart, it cannot circulate.
If blood cannot leave the heart, it cannot circulate.
Without circulation—
She pinches it shut and tries to stay conscious despite the tantalizing nature of the force calling her to give up and fall asleep.
Sakura can pinpoint the exact moment of his death.
When they’re both on the ground, Shikamaru pries his arm from her throat, something like desperation and fear in his eyes.
Sakura coughs and coughs and coughs once she’s gotten enough oxygen in her lungs to expel it.
“Sakura . . . ” Chouji’s voice is timid, tentative. He looks afraid for her, and she has to wonder how she must look right now, completely chakra exhausted and halfway to death. He opens a chip bag for her, handing it to her gingerly, like she might break under the force of aluminum-lined plastic.
She takes it gratefully alongside the soldier pill Shikamaru hands her. Her breathing has steadied, still heavy—but consistent, now, and that’s all she could ask for.
“Seal up the bodies,” Sakura orders. “We’re going home.”
Unsurprisingly, it’s Sasuke who meets Team 10 plus Sakura at Konoha’s gate two and a half days later.
It’s a fifty-fifty chance for either of her boys, usually—but Naruto has been working himself to the bone trying to figure out the semantics of jutsu creation.
He'll be disappointed he missed their arrival.
Sakura is fourteen and on the verge of collapse when she falls into Sasuke’s alarmed hold, a corpse ready for autopsy stored in her almost-empty weapon pouch.
(She needs to see for herself.)
Ino huffs at her, all worry and barely-masked concern, muttering something about how she should go rest and that Shikamaru will take care of the mission report. Shikamaru, in turn, groans about how troublesome she is, and Chouji spends the next five minutes they're in Sakura's view trying to break up the ensuing fight.
Sasuke only stares at her, analyzing, trying to dig underneath the underneath.
“I took a soldier pill,” Sakura admits, smile strained, just to watch his eyes narrow and roll in the same breath.
Sakura’s mentor looks up at her over the exposed, ruptured heart of a man whose name she never learned and never will.
The Godaime smiles at her, and it’s blinding in the sheer amount of pride it carries.
Tsunade breathes out, awed. A gloved finger reaches out to trace the edges of Sakura’s handiwork. “The amount of control it must have taken to—just concentrate your chakra like this. It’s almost unfathomable, Sakura.”
She watches her mentor, eyes wide and heart bursting with the anticipation that’s burning through her nerves.
Konoha’s Hokage stares her right in the eye and says: “I’ve never imagined that this could ever be possible,” in a way that sounds like of course it was you.
Sakura grins back.
The next time she looks in a mirror, her smile lines are deeper than they've ever been.